Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sampy Sicada. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sampy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

Since coming to the US three years ago, I’ve learned that anti-intellectualism here is as big a problem as described abroad and in sociology/political science.

This poses challenges not just to my job as an artist and public speaker on media theory but also my social life. People are more prone to dismissing anything they don’t understand as pretentious or necessarily pointless compared to what little they do understand. I feel my character count hamstrung by attention spans cutting out shorter than I am accustomed to and their being thrown off by the mere mention of something slightly theoretical. I saw that average-sized words are now deemed big words and having to cut my own teeth off to avoid social sidelining is a constant temptation. Shockingly, this occurs even in academic environments.

Stories that spring to mind include the time when a girl in class demanded that I speak with smaller words to be more inclusive (the biggest word I had used must’ve been “tendency”), this was in an English class no less! I remember a friend telling me to “tone it down” as it left them intimidated by my mere mentioning of someone like Freud.

These events were upsetting especially as someone who loves to get stuck into deeper conversation and philosophy.

Around a year into living here, I found myself losing my verbal confidence and all-around intelligence. It was a difficult time.

Saying anything that sounded like dismissing the environment as the problem felt like an egoistic reflex that I wanted to avoid. So I slowly took it to be my fault for not being right. For overthinking and overintellectualizing. For being too much. Things started turning around when I spoke with more liberal arts professors and realized that it wasn’t just in my head.

If full-blown PhD’s are being suppressed by a widespread denigration of the canon and academic study, then of course I would be less tolerated. Slowly I rediscovered my fervor and became more shameless about who I was and wanted to be. I started reading books relentlessly, imposing intellect upon conversations, forcing them to come up rather than the opposite, I no longer felt ashamed that I had done my homework and gave my job the respect it deserved even if it exposed those who didn’t.

This mindset shift yielded results, I had the privilege of speaking on podcasts with art historians and giving an hour-long guest lecture for professors. I love my job and nobody will take that from me again.

Sometimes, the thinker looks like an overthinker because nobody thinks.

Sampy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a traditional fine artist, specializing in surrealist illustrations in color pencils, charcoal and graphite. My art practise is supplemented by my public speaking on art developments and media theory. I also work on films as a concept artist and storyboarder.

After a bout with homelessness in 2016, I began drawing and gaining a slight following on social media. I soon found myself employed at a few startups in London, working as a graphic designer before rising to the rank of art director and creative editor for four companies. A short documentary was then made on me, describing my journey from homelessness to artmaking. This launched me in the UK art world as I began exhibiting and selling pieces at gallery shows.

My proudest moments would be getting into the London Art Biennale and exhibiting at the World Trade Center for the New York Ad Art Show. I am now based in America looking to continue improving my art and showing it to the world.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I have fairly technical advice from working as a social media manager for the startups mentioned where I had to learn how to grow accounts on the job. These skills translated well when I focused on my art page which I’ve grown to 9k followers within 18 months of being hacked and having to start afresh.

The main issues within your control are posting consistently and engaging on the app actively. The more you interact within your domain the more likely users are going to engage with your posts which drives up your ranking in the algorithm. This is the main task of a social media manager and Instagram is cracking down on botty behaviour all the time so one must be mindful of how many actions they are partaking in per day. Your total actions are limited when the account is newer (less trust from the system) and during election periods (where fake news and bots are a germane issue). We’re currently in the midst of an election so my advice of late for those who haven’t started is to hold off on posting until it is over, stocking up on posts in the meantime.

Changing metadata on images that are screenshots is also crucial as posts that they detect to be repeats will rank lower. The easiest way to do this is just to drag your image/reposts into a new file on Photoshop and save it as a new file entirely. This makes the world of difference for post ranking. Editing posts after they are up also messes with the ranking so it’s best to leave it up for a few months before editing captions or getting it right in the first go. Reporting posts also puts a spotlight on your account as much as whoever you’ve reported so that’s been a way many pages have gotten into trouble.

A lot of these tactics boil down to being obsequiously perfect and not overstepping boundaries. It’s really mechanical and frustrating when you commit an error but you’ll get better at doing it with time.

Attention is the currency of the artist as much as this feels ghoul-y. It’s not a total meritocracy in any field. Great artists languish with no fans whilst rubbish ones are multimillionaires. No one’s going to hand it to you. Playing the game is as much a part of being an artist as the art itself, as much as budding artists want to dismiss its importance as a moralising disguise for their digital and entrepreneurial illiteracy.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I see myself as playing a part in the re-modernizing of the arts, somewhere between the Stuckists and the Odd Nerdrum Kitsch cohorts. The arts have taken a battering over the past century with the influx of endless postmodern rabbit holes and declining standards at art schools. Well intentioned movements to democratize the arts for the masses have failed. The new beourgeousie has taken full advantage of the lowered standards of skill to hold a hegemony.

The elites of the past needed to be skillful, they only need to be rich these days ala ready-mades and commissioned craftspeople hoisting up your Damien Hirsts and Jeff Koons of the world. Budding artists play into their hands when they hide behind “their style” and denigrate skill. The best way to pushback against the rot is if we collectively make skill a necessity again. I’ve spoken about this publicly and will continue to do so.

The intentional leap of faith towards meaning-making is being (re)made with various sectors of the creative fields; the aforementioned Stuckists and Kitsch movements, stuffier sorts like the Art Renewal Center but also with the metamodern philosophers and New Sincerity movement in literature. Unlike a lot of cultural pundits, I don’t believe in chucking out pomo or critical theory entirely. I’d like to rescue the most useful of their work alongside the farther canon’s virtues. As our world multiculturalises further, this seems the best way to arrive at the cosmopolitan future we all desire.

Aiming for beauty is daunting, especially for a young artist, you risk failing and thus falling into ugliness. But it is certainly the more admirable choice than playing off ugliness as choice as has become the trend. Petulant iconoclasm deserves less symbolic capital and underscoring than this message. So it’s what I continue to insist upon. Artists have to be brave again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sicada.co
• Instagram: @sampy_draws